The New Mithraeum Database

Acclaimed esoteric scholar @peter.mark.adams talks about his latest book, ‘Ritual and Epiphany in the Mysteries of Mithras’, interviewed by professor, writer and host of The New Mithraeum podcast @andreu.abuin.

Two extracts from De abstinentia ab esu animalium by Porphyry on sacrifices and the importance of abstinence from animal food among Persian Magi.

Of Isis and Osiris or Of the Ancient Religion and Philosophy of Egypt, Plutarch, The Moralia.

Dion Chrysostom, c. 100 A.D., a philosophical writer under the emperors Nerva and Trajan, composed a series of discourses or essays (λόγοι) on various subjects, in one of which he reports concerning the doctrines and practices of the magi.

Commentaries by Pseudo-Nonnus, also known as Nonnus the Abbot, on Gregory Nazianzen’s In Julianum Imperatorem Invectivae Duae and In Sancta Lumina.

Bronze statuette of Mithras in his characteristic bull-slaying pose, though only the god has been preserved.

This scene of a feast from Mérida shows three persons at a table with other people standing beside them, one holding a bull’s head on a plate.

This inscription commemorates the building of a mithraeum in Bremenium with fellow worshippers of Mithras.

Figures in procession, each representing a different grade of Mithraic initiation, labeled with their respective titles.

This sculpture of Mithras killing the bull was dedicated to the ’incomprehensible god’ by a certain priest called Gaius Valerius Heracles.

Fragment of a greyish marble relief depicting Mithras slaying the bull beneath a rocky grotto.

Fragment of a marble relief (H. 0.27 Br. 0.38 D. 0.045).

There is no solid evidences of the finding of a Mithraic temple in Duhok, Iraq.

The relief depict several unusual scenes from Mithras’s myth.

In this terracotta relief depicting Mithras as a bull killer found at Cales, now in Calvi Risorta, none of the usual accompanying animals is present.

Marble relief, probably found in Rome during the construction of the Palazzo Primoli along the Via Zanardelli.

Around the niche of the Dura Europos Mithraeum fragments of a series of small paintings set in a semicircular band of panels were found.

Around the relief with Mithras as a bullkiller, a number of scenes from the Mithras Iegend have been painted in the Mithraeum of Dura Europos.

Inscription from Hamadan where the ’great king’ Artaxerxes mentions Ahuramazda, Anahita, and Mithra as guardians.

This fresco, found in the Santa Capua Vetere Mithraeum, depicts what seems to be an initiate falling forward because someone is pressing down on his shoulders.